This is a model I'm currently working on, and apart from a general opinion, I was hoping you could also maybe give me a hint as to how to achieve a couple of things.

It's at roughly 2,2 million polys atm, but there are some turbosmoothed items hidden in there, so once I get rid of those it'll hopefully be less. I also modelled it from simple objects, so the ship is comprised of many smallers segments, which I will merge later on.

I am thinking about how to get to unwrapping this one, since the modeling itself should soon be completed, and I have pre-unwrapped some parts, but do you have any suggestions as to how I should go about making the UV layout?

secondly, I would like to render as much of the scene as possible with Vray (Krakatoa will be used for particles) and I have no idea on hot to make the engines look really cool like I want them to - Something like this. Any Ideas?

Other than that, hope you like it, and if any interest will arise, I'll update the work frequently.

How big is it supposed to be? Your details look a bit large and even, and its hard to determine scale.

Good UV's can sometimes take almost as long as the modelling, and different parts and surfaces could require different techniques. Did you use instantiated parts?

For the exhaust, you can try modelling the rough shape of the flame, and applying a volume shader or just a constant shader. Place that on a separate render layer, and add some blur and glow in a compositor. That would be the easy low quality way. I'm not much of an FX/compositor guy though.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try it out with the exhausts! I did try and run a bunch of FumeFX simulations, but I just decided that all the results were nowhere near what I wanted, to irregular and strange looking.

I did not use instances, because I was not sure if I could merge them properly later on, but I can always unwrap one piece and then copy it a bunch of times over anyways. It's a love project, so I'm not in a rush.

A small update, replaced most upper front cylindrical towers with something that does at least some justice to the gothic in battlefleet gothic, still toying around with the numerous effects I'll be using in the final scene, and I also think I set up the environment I want to use the model in pretty well. That's it for now, hopefully I'll get to towing with the engine exhaust flames tomorrow.

Wow, that's pretty big! To be honest, I thought it might be around 300-500m from looking at your first image, not 15km.

Try adding some small details to help increase the sense of scale. One of the things that makes the deathstar and star destroyers look so big are the yellow bands of window lights that show the decks. They really help to give a sense of scale, and show that they are thousands of meters high.

I definitely plan on doing that, however I am still figuring out the limit to which I am going to model the detail in, and where exactly I'll switch to texture detailing alone. I am adding more towers etc, so that the detail will be nicely ornate and evenly distributed, but I am also thinking about hot not to turn this into an absolute texturing nightmare at the same time.

EDIT:

I did some fiddling around with the engines, or should I say engine flames, and what I managed to come up with is this:

However!

The issue lies here:

I used Vray lens effect to achieve the lense flare, however I could not, for the life of me, get it to only form glare on the engine flames. I tried playing with the Object IDs, setting the flames to 0 and everything else to 2, and the other way around as well, but only got the lens effect to show everywhere BUT the flames. I also tried using an obstacle image (a render pass of only the light emitting areas), but to no avail. I got a totally black image rendered. Does anybody have any ideas on how to tackle this, as I would really love to be able to avoid comping glare and flares into the image as much as possible. :/ And If I give an all black material to everything else but the engine flames, I get a totally useless flare which is smudged and totally different from the one here, not to mention that the "black" area is smudged all over and useless. So, any bright ideas?

You should really give AfterEffects or Photoshop a go. If you cant access those programs, try GIMP.

The Vray flares are just a post effect. They get applied after the image has finished rendering, so there's nothing that they can do that you cant do in another post program. The advantage is that you can dial in the settings without having to re render the scene.

The ship looks awesome. I'm going to agree with AJ here and recommend you try doing the engine effects in After Effects or Photoshop. In my opinion they currently look too saturated, which I think is actually a result of the lens flare.

Since this ship is supposed to be gigantic; I think your engines/rockets are too dominant - they have a similar scale ratio to that of a jet fighter and end up making your ship look smaller. I think a smaller propulsion system would give the ship scale. Also, from a Sci-Fi fiction perspective we tend to expect "space power" to be cooler colours such as blue / green and not warmer yellow / orange which gives a more earthly look.

I am loving the design of the ship. Looking forward to your next stage.

Thanks for the tip, I'll make them smaller and possibly blueish, and start figuring out the "plasma trails", I think I'll go with particles on that one.

I did reach a bit of a bump down the path, as I visited a local store which held some BFG models and I realised my life was a lie. The models are even more modular than I presumed, so I'm remaking the ship into sections atm. Luckily I get to reuse most of the components, so it shouldn't take too much time, but it's a minor setback time-wise non the less.

As for the glare comp, I did use photoshop in the end, however I hoped to be able to avoid using it for this matter. I read in the vray manual that I can assign the glare effect to objects based on matID, but no sucsess thus far. Oh well, I'll just go with photoshop I guess.

I redid the front end, and made it a bit more detailed, better looking and better organized. Still have to catch up on a few kinks, and then it's to the overhaul of the lower back end, which I am pretty unhappy with.

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